As a child in the 1940s I had trouble reconciling the stories learned at Sunday School with the world that was unfolding around me. Talk of peace, love, and hope -- especially at Christmas -- didn’t make much sense when we were seeing newsphotos of the London blitz, or piles of skulls at Auschwitz or the bleak rubble of Hiroshima.

This Christmas, anno Domini 2002, I have the same trouble, despite some 60 years of believing in human progress toward a better world. As we sing about "Good tidings of comfort and joy" and "Peace on Earth and mercy mild", the skies over the cradle of civilization are filled not with silent stars and herald angels but with spy satellites and aircraft bearing Hellfire missiles. Instead of towns in "deep and dreamless sleep" and shepherds quaking in awe of heavenly hosts, we have farmers begging for permission to harvest their olives, and families huddled in tents, trembling in terror of Apache helicopters.

At the time of Jesus wars were what we would call terrorism today -- bloody matters of soldiers personally hacking one another to death, burning homes and crops, raping and enslaving women and children. Torture was widely practiced for any purpose, or for entertainment. Criminals were executed in public, painful, protracted ways, like stoning or crucifixion..

A thousand years later warfare was still basically terrorism, but on a larger scale, better organized, and mostly directed at infidels at the edges of the known world. In both pagan and Christian Europe, public vengeance for evil deeds (or just being different) was considered educational, uplifting and entertaining. The spectacle took many forms: hanging, disembowelment, dismemberment, impalement. For hundreds of years burning at the stake was a preferred method of executing criminals or dissenters. (Firewood was cheap, it was a multimedia show, and cleanup was easy.) Torture was used to extract confessions to salve the consciences of the righteous.

Human ingenuity and calculation in the 20th century brought killing, torture, terrorism and war to new heights. During war after war "to end war", we developed new concepts like "psychological warfare", "ethnic cleansing", "collateral damage" and "counter-insurgency", as well as devices of escalating fiendishness for large-scale killing: mustard gas, incendiary bombs, nuclear warheads, napalm, nerve gas, claymore mines, herbicides, long-range bombers, attack helicopters, remote-controlled missiles, and bacterial, viral and fungal agents.

In this new millennium we have the means to extend these deadly devices to whole nations, and accept : "collateral damage" and "pre-emptive strikes" as awkward but necessary. Humans in many nations use torture, terrorism and war instrumentally, to accomplish certain ends; societies justify, admire and praise them, teach them to children, and commend them to allies.

And torture, terrorism and war are no longer the exclusive province of evil tyrants, racist dictators, ignorant savages or religious zealots. They are now carried out equally by profit-oriented corporate bureaucrats, elected and appointed government officials, and disciplined military professionals. They are widely employed by nations with massive military powers governed by rich, arrogant elites who are willing -- indeed, eager -- to use any force to achieve their ends.

How do killing, torture, terrorism and war really work in the world today? Does killing Palestinian children or summarily executing suspected terrorists pacify their families and decrease violence? Does torturing prisoners yield reliable information? Is terrorism checked by bigger, deadlier and more terrible retaliation? Has war produced peace on earth -- anywhere, any time?

So then why do killing, torture, terrorism and war persist in a supposedly civilized world?

Apparently they persist on carelessness and inattention, on personal and parochial goals that keep us from considering the differences between escorting a child to a gas chamber, dropping a bomb on her, or letting her starve.

They are entrenched in our traditional loyalties to kin, nation, race, or religion that keep us from seeing the connection between our comfort and the misery of others, or from recognizing the association of torture with military forces trained in counter-insurgency.

They endure in our linguistic rationalizations -- catch-phrases, cliches, urban myths, media melodrama, and bureaucratic jargon -- that justify war, terrorism and torture, and prevent us from taking responsibility for consequences of our choices: consequences like global warming, poverty, AIDS, famine and terrorism itself.

After 2002 years too many of us are neither seeing the world as it really is, nor hearing the angels’ song of what it could be. After all these years we should have learned that killing and violence only breed more of the same, and that peace and prosperity must be for all, or they will be for none. This year as never before we should be humble about the human failure that has made violence and war ascendant all over our world and brought us to the brink of the what will surely be most deadly war in history.

We should understand that life and peace on earth are contingent on our ability to love all our children, and to rise above our fears and learn to live with one another, sharing both prosperity and hardship.

We have a lot to be humble about, but we also have cause for hope. There is a growing chorus, not just of angels, but of ordinary folk, singing ‘Peace on Earth’, calling for an end to killing, terrorism, torture and war, and trying to change the ways we talk about one another and treat one another.

Perhaps this Christmas....

Caroline Arnold served 12 years on the staff of Senator John Glenn, and now chairs the Kent Environmental Council in Kent, Ohio. E-mail: csarnold@neo.rr.com

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